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It’s been nearly six months since the WannaCry ransomware stole global headlines and thousands of security practitioners flocked to threat intelligence feeds to help streamline their investigations. While the security community has learned many valuable lessons from the attack, it’s impossible to say that a strike of this magnitude won’t ha

It’s now easier than ever to make threat intelligence from IBM X-Force Exchange actionable. Since its inception in 2015, X-Force Exchange has provided both granular indicators of compromise and higher-order intelligence through public collections to help shorten security investigations.
A recent update to the X-Force Exchange collaborative platform no

Full disclosure: I would not eat guacamole for years because a certain puppet-centric movie I saw as a child had me convinced that it was actually made of frog brains. Once in college, however, seeing guacamole being made completely changed my opinion — unlike a sausage-making demonstration in a rather unfortunate public speaking class that same year of coll

IBM X-Force Kassel is a research team that operates massive spam honeypots and monitoring, gleaning data from billions of unsolicited emails every year. With such large amounts of spam coming in, we can more easily map trends. We looked at one recently when analyzing the spammer’s workweek.
Our goal in this analysis was to delve into six months of data

As both a parent and a bit of a nerd, I have a lot of corny jokes in my arsenal that cover a wide range of topics including animals, food, science fiction and the like. One of my favorite jokes comes from my data science background: “I never metadata I didn’t like.” This joke has it all: wordplay, the spirit of a joke your uncle might tell

This is the first installment in an ongoing series about banking malware that faded away in 2017.
Cybercrime is a very dynamic threat landscape. With over 100 million malware strains tracked by AV-TEST in 2016, malware can be a dime a dozen. When it comes to the more organized cybercrime groups and sophisticated banking Trojan projects, malware families are

The cyberthreat intelligence (CTI) community has not yet agreed on attribution for the threat actor behind the NotPetya malware, but it is actively investigating. The apparent objective of NotPetya is to destroy infected computers, not necessarily to hold data ransom.
Hopefully, you have already invested in solid backups. But when it comes to further manag

The TrickBot Trojan has been steadily ramping up its activity this year, going into a rather intensive period of updates and attacks that started in Q2 2017. From the looks of it, TrickBot’s operators have been investing heavily into widening the scope of their attacks and are preparing redirection attacks against banks in 19 different countries.
After

Co-authored by Steve Stone
After finalizing initial analysis, IBM X-Force Incident Response and Intelligence Services (IRIS) concluded that the Petya variant attacks that started on Tuesday, June 27, were intended as destructive attacks against Ukraine, rather than a means for cybercriminals to make money from ransom payouts. In other words, this attack was

Early on Tuesday, June 27, reports began to circulate that organizations in the Ukraine and elsewhere in Europe were suffering ransomware attacks. It quickly became clear that this Petya attack could equal or surpass the May WannaCry attack.
WannaCry’s spread was so successful because it was powered by a flaw in Windows, and although Microsoft had rele

Last month, we celebrated the two-year anniversary of the IBM X-Force Exchange (XFE). During that week, the threat intelligence sharing platform reached a record spike in traffic as users flocked to the site to stay up to date on the recently exposed WannaCry ransomware.
10 Threat Intelligence Sharing Tips to Fight Cybercrime
As the X-Force team populated th

There are certain knowing glances that experienced parents give each other in the face of a public toddler meltdown. The sheer red-faced, quaking, loud explosion of the tantrum reminds us that 2-year-olds are entirely exasperating human beings and terrible roommates.
But there is a new kind of 2-year-old on the scene now that is well-behaved, well-groomed

Dry Your Eyes: Lessons Learned From WannaCry
If you’re reading this post, congratulations! You hopefully aren’t using one of the more than 200,000 computers that were hit by the first wave of the WannaCry ransomware attack. Those unfortunate victims are dealing with bigger problems right now, such as how to admit patients to their emergency rooms

Co-authored by Michelle Alvarez.
During an outbreak of zero-day attacks, IBM X-Force needs to work fast to assess the threat to inform customers and others of the risk and offer steps to mitigate or resolve the issue. Once the dust settles, though, we like to circle back, review what happened and identify any notable trends.
The attacks launched against the

IBM X-Force research follows organized cybercrime and continually monitors the criminals’ targets and modus operandi. In a recent analysis of TrickBot campaigns in the U.K., Australia and Germany, I found that the operators of the infamous Trojan have been adding new redirection attacks focused on a list of brands that I had never seen in the past.
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